GameboyRMH's Journal: Live system RAM testing script

Here's a memory-testing script I wrote for my home server. Normally if you have a computer with non-ECC RAM you notice bad RAM when the computer acts insane - random crashes, files getting corrupted for no apparent reason, things like that. This will run a memory test while your OS is up and running, using whatever free RAM is available minus a reserve amount. You need to have memtester installed to use this script. I set mine to run once a week, it will peg your CPU and of course consume a lot of RAM while running.

#! /bin/bash
 
logfile='/var/log/memreport'
date +'%c' > $logfile
free -h >> $logfile
#Amount of RAM in MB to leave free when testing:
reserveram=256
#Get free RAM
freeram=`free -m | grep Mem | sed 's/\s\+/,/g' | cut -d , -f4`;
cachedram=`free -m | grep Mem | sed 's/\s\+/,/g' | cut -d , -f7`;
testram=`expr $freeram + $cachedram - $reserveram`;
if [ $testram -gt 0 ]
then
        memtester `echo -n $testram`M 1 >> $logfile
else
        echo "Insufficient free RAM for test" >> $logfile
fi
#----Check for errors and put warning in Issues file---
ERRORS=`grep -i fail $logfile`
if [ -n "$ERRORS" ]
then
        echo "\n WARNING - Memory Errors! \n" >> /etc/issue.custom
fi

Thanks to ASLR it will test a practically random sampling of the majority of your available RAM every time it runs, and hopefully catch any errors early on.